Where There's Smoke
by WholesomeToast
Summary: "I went to your father's funeral. I told your mother that you were gonna be okay." She offered a small smile. "How did you know?" he asked. The elevator dinged its arrival, doors wheezing open. "I just knew," she professed softly as she entered the lift. / In episode 2 of season 3 ("Paper Clip"), Mulder comes back to life. Here is what I believe should've happened directly after...


**an X-Files one shot set during (and utilizing original dialogue from) season 3 episode 2, "Paper Clip"**

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He smelled like fire even from a few feet away, and she recognized the musky profiles of smoke, pine, and damp earth immediately. It was a living scent, the very essence of life, death, and rebirth all at once. It was Fox Mulder, alive and punching demands through Skinner like he hadn't been missing for the past three days, yet instead of embracing with relief, they each held one another at gunpoint, distrust dripping from their gun-sights. Fitting in her line of work, of course they would reunite like this, but very much against her Hippocratic nature, especially given that Mulder seemed to be standing only by sheer will-power just now, a strange leanness lending new edges to his form. There was no need to guess what was swirling behind those dark eyes beneath the filthy, disheveled hair; she could see it in the stiff way he held his shoulders, hear it in the tight volume of his voice. Her eyes stung on his behalf as she recalled something her mother once said: "Grief turns the human spirit into a caged animal dying to howl beside the graves of our lost loves; it replaces all common sense with a feral, gnawing ache for answers, and it's an ache that must always go hungry." Knowing Mulder as she did, it was clear he was already starving.

By some miracle, just like in her dream, he was back. It was like wishing really hard for something and suddenly getting it, just in time for Christmas, and for a moment, with her weapon trained on the only people she could trust, a spark took hold in her. This was too good to be true and she was going to let it be.

The standoff concluded, Scully trotted after Mulder, two and a half steps to every one stride, stopping just behind him in front of the elevator doors. Pressing for the lobby and turning to face her, he caught her wide eyes tracing his form, as if taking a personal inventory of him with a deep, shaky breath. An unstoppable grin smeared across her ruby lips. Two arms, two legs, ten fingers, that nose: Mulder was alive.

His own eyes took her in, the way they always did. Something in her stammered and she felt like explaining.

"Mulder, I-," she tried.

He gripped her shoulders, stopping her.

"Scully, whatever you're gonna say-," he began in that voice: the gentle, earnest one, the one that said even now, after all the hell he'd been through, he was still trying to make the mess easier for her. She almost smiled again. If Mulder were a book, she'd be able to read him from miles away. Wounded and wide open, that's how she'd described him to a friend once, priding herself on diagnosing him as a bleeding heart from day one. She really had to explain now, before he brought her any closer, as he surely would. Personal space was an alien concept to Mulder, interestingly enough.

"I went to your father's funeral," she blurted quickly, avoiding the inevitable while meeting his eyes with a steadiness she only half felt. _Mulder, I'm fine,_ her big blues insisted. The familiar hands slipped away. "I told your mother that you were gonna be okay." She offered a small smile.

"How did you know?" he asked, eyes incandescent with laser-like focus, reading her. He stood so close she could practically feel the question against her cheek.

The elevator dinged its arrival, doors wheezing open.

"I just knew," she professed softly as she entered the lift.

A heartbeat later, Mulder followed her in and selected the lobby, mulling over her statement of blind faith as the doors closed. The elevator shuddered before beginning its descent, the slow mechanism bestowing on its weary cargo the gift of a few peaceful seconds out of a living nightmare all to themselves.

In the silence, Scully took a deep breath, unconsciously wetting her upper lip. Her mind was inexplicably still, expression resolute as her pulse continued buzzing beneath her watch band.

"'You okay, Scully?" She felt his gaze before she heard his voice.

She glanced up at him, pressing her lips together between her teeth. How could she tell her resurrected co-worker - no, her friend - no! maybe something else - how infinitely and completely relieved she was to have him back; how, several time times in the last 72 hours, she'd demanded that God return him to her unharmed (or so help her); how she'd had to numb herself with the work just to keep going? How could she tell him how much she wanted to give herself permission to let him hold her and not let go until she was absolutely certain she wasn't dreaming this time? Her throat felt tight as she pondered how she could say anything remotely close to that without sounding like an unhealthily attached twenty-something, without giving away the racing of her heartbeat at his realness, his nearness, his _him_ness? She could feel the rims of her eyes growing red, her vision misting as she huffed out a short, embarrassed laugh.

"It's usually around this part of the evening that I come back to my senses and realize that this is all just a cruel pizza dream," she admitted with a sniffle and a sparkling grin, very deliberately stopping the incriminating leak beneath her nose in its tracks with the back of her hand.

Mulder let out a youthful giggle.

"What's the matter, Scully? Need to feel my hands, put your fingers in my sides? Can't speak to how clean they are, but they're a hell of a lot warmer than they were a few days ago," he teased with a lazy, boyish grin, arms open against his hips. Something at the base of Scully's neck shivered as he spoke, and she anxiously ran a hand through her mussy carmine hair.

She recognized that tone. His previously hoarse, frustrated voice was now gentle and taunting, barely stirring above a passing murmur, the way wind seduces a fir tree in the woods, willing it to sway into a breezy embrace. It was a tone the likes of which he used under his breath around her all the time, casually flirting away over cases far more serious than this irreverent elevator ride. All those countless times of merciless teasing and careful distance, her cautiously constructed armor against his nonchalant come-ons to keep the work and their effortless partnership from becoming jeopardized by emotionalism, and yet here they were, almost to the lobby, one of them only recently alive, and something inside her starting to pull with raw magnetism, if ever a man's body were true north. She bit her lips again, nervous energy and a little something else sizzling in her collarbones, right beneath her skull. He smelled like fire from inches away, and suddenly, Scully wanted to burn...

A light turned on in those mischievous hazel eyes as she unknowingly and yet purposely took a step closer.

"Why Agent Scully, is my distressed-casual-survivalist-woodsman vibe eliciting a hitherto unprovoked strong instinctual feminine response to the opposite sex?" Mulder prodded, adding a little bedroom to his already bedridden voice.

Scully smirked, blossom-lips pursed, eyes brimming with a special look she would come to realize as reserved only for him.

The elevator slowed.

"I'd say it's highly unlikely, but not outside the realm of extreme possibility," she replied in an equally smoldering timbre, easily closing the distance and balancing on her toes to reach his tired grin. Her breath caught in her lungs for a millisecond as his smile closed against her parted mouth, the warmth of him combining with his contagious energy and that lingering hint of palo santo and sage. Without much more invitation, Mulder slipped his arms around her tiny form and held her tenderly to himself, sinking slowly against the button panel before reaching back to shut the doors. Hang the lobby; his rationality would need re-calibrating after kissing Dana Scully, and she would have to forgive herself for bulldozing in five seconds what years of wisdom conspired to build for their mutual protection.

Without listening to a single one of a million alarm bells going off in her brain, her small right hand pressed against his chest and the left gently gripped the back of his neck as naturally as if that was where they were made to be. Hungry mouths met again and again in the obnoxious fluorescent light as a guilt-laced pleasure began building in the pit of Dana's stomach. Deep down she knew he was still exhausted, worn thin like a rag-doll left out in the rain, but the taste of languid want kept pressing her closer from the inside out. No doubt for Mulder, being sandwiched between a cold elevator wall and a perky redhead's small, warm body was more enticing than any bed could've been at that moment. Nevertheless, despite every fiber, every synapse being ablaze, hardwired systematic rationality prevailed, and she began pulling away as he tried to find her lips again.

A cold analytical sobriety took hold of her senses once she leaned back, his lips barely scathing hers as she took an embarrassingly shallow breath. This didn't deter him in the least from an endearing last attempt to rekindle the previous sentiment with a brief, oblivious, wildly attractive nuzzle.

_Mary and Joseph, Dana, focus! _she willed.

"Mulder, I don't think it behooves either of us for me to take advantage of you when you're so weak like this," Scully declined breathlessly, the butterflies in her abdomen rendering a cliched nausea. She could already feel her mind summarily categorizing every sensation into a delicious memory she hoped would replay in future sleep cycles. This was no way to be spending a time-sensitive, life and death investigation, and yet to give over for just that one little moment of indiscretion and have that warm, experienced mouth enveloping hers...

Mulder grinned as he opened his eyes, brushing a hand over her hair.

"I am in full possession of my mental faculties, Agent Scully." His keen eyes flicked almost knowingly over her face as she attempted to compose herself while still lingering in his arms.

"Mulder, really, we should get going, this is hardly an ethical way to be spending our time. We have a responsibility-," she started to push away in distracted earnest, a twinge of anxiety filling her chest.

"Scully." He tilted her chin up, her eyes lifting slowly to meet his.

It was as if time didn't exist as they gazed into one another. Vaguely, she recalled a homily she sat in on a few years ago right before graduating Quantico wherein the priest referenced the eyes as the windows to the soul. Somewhere in her scientific mind this proverb suddenly rang vibrantly true, the view through Mulder's windows as clear as the coast on a sharp winter's morning. The mystic incense of answered prayer clinging to his whole person now shrouded them both in that sterile box and somehow in the back of her mind she could see herself standing with him on the pebbled beach of a crystal shore. Fog swallowed them with her next breath.

Not a single word had passed between them and yet-

_That's a lot of cards on the table_, she heard herself think. She imagined he heard her, too. He almost responded...

With an indignant crunch, the elevator doors loudly re-opened. This time, Scully calmly disentangled herself from his arms and stepped out into the bracing chill of the lobby.

"That's a sign, Mulder; let's get out of here," she announced, an all-business tone returning to her voice.

Mulder wearily heaved his weight back onto his own two feet.

"Coming, G-woman," he called just as the doors started closing again. Quickly, he thrust himself through the elevator's electric eye, following her away from the dimly lit apartment building and out into another blustery night, on the heels of forever...

Created by  
Chris Carter

**THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE**

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Thanks for reading; I concocted this bit of wish-fulfillment back in July of 2015, when I first started watching The X-Files, and just now decided I wanted to polish it up and republish it here. I recently subjected myself to the final episodes of season eleven and oh boy do I have feelings about all that! Chris Carter, you demon, Mulder and Scully deserved a well-lit kiss scene and, dammit, so did we!

Like and review at your leisure :)


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